Open Source

AMD SDK Unifies Heterogeneous Computing

AMD has used its 2013 Developer Summit to announcing a new "unified" SDK with an improved CodeXL tool suite plus heterogeneous acceleration in popular open source libraries.

The company gives developers a route to modern heterogeneous platforms spanning form servers to PCs to handheld devices.

AMD's Manju Hegde explains that the unified SDK includes AMD APP SDK 2.9 and is the most user-friendly heterogeneous computing SDK yet. "Some of the salient features are: a web-based sample browser to find the right samples for a project; added support for CMake — a popular make utility; improved OpenCL source editing with a plug-in to visual studio; and the addition of several new samples highlighting use of optimized open source libraries (OpenCV, Bolt) to get acceleration."

The unified SDK also includes the Media SDK v1.0 beta release with its GPU-accelerated video pre/post processing library and a library for low latency video encoding.

Also here are new heterogeneous acceleration optimizations in several open source libraries. These have been included with the goal of making it simple for developers to accelerate applications. They include: OpenCV (most popular computer vision library) now with many OpenCL accelerated functions; clMath with accelerated BLAS and FFT libraries accessible from Fortran, C, and C++; and Bolt, a C++ template library providing GPU off-load for common data-parallel algorithms, now with cross-OS support as well as performance improvements and new functionality.

According to AMD, these new product releases represent another step forward toward the firm's goals of supporting cross-platform solutions (across OSes and vendors), multiple programming languages, and continued contributions to the open source community.

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task.
However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Video

This month's Dr. Dobb's Journal

This month,
Dr. Dobb's Journal is devoted to mobile programming. We introduce you to Apple's new Swift programming language, discuss the perils of being the third-most-popular mobile platform, revisit SQLite on Android
, and much more!